Iron-Blooded Filings
by Aeanagwen
Summary: A selection of meme fills for Iron-Blooded Orphans concerning various pairings and groupings, on the theme of, "Things You Said."
1. Human Debris Trio

_(things you said when you were scared | things you said with no space between us)_

(Chad, on his way to his new—terrible—life as Human Debris, has a significant meeting.)

* * *

"Where do you think we're going?"

Chad blinks, slowly, dredged up out of his dull staring at the bolts lining the walls of the freight truck. Beside him, a heavier boy—shoved in behind him with no concern for their relative sizes, but he'd shot Chad's thin frame a look and straightened off of him as best he could in his restraints, unspeaking—shifts as well. He looks over his shoulder at the boy pressed against Chad's back, the one whose whisper, taut and ragged, had broken the rattling, jostling rhythm of the drive.

No one says anything else at first. The truck hits another pothole, and the whole mass of boys in the truck bounce and rock, the moment rough with whimpers or cursing. When they stabilize, crushed into each other anew, he tries again.

"The road's getting really bad. We're leaving Chryse, right?"

"Who cares?" the boy at Chad's shoulder mumbles. He squirms in place, trying to straighten his back.

" _I do!_ " the speaker protests, and Chad winces at the volume, and the sharp outrage in the boy's voice. "My name's Dante."

Chad and the boy next to him share a briefly bewildered look. Chad shifts, resting his other side against the wall and trying to look over his shoulder at the third boy. All he can see is a smudge of red hair in the deep shadows; it tickles at his nose as Dante tries to turn and look at them as well.

"Can't you be quiet?" The boy beside Chad sounds tired. "So what if we're leaving Chryse?"

"I'm just trying to figure out where we're going," Dante complains. With their backs pressed together, Chad can feel the faint vibration of his talking. "Maybe it'll be a factory or something. That'd be better than getting shot up."

"At a factory you'd lose an arm and they'd toss you out on the street," the boy next to Chad responds gloomily. "I'd rather fight again."

"Wait, so you've fought before?"

Chad closes his eyes. The darkness sways behind his eyelids, lulling. The desire to blank out again rises up through him, a sticky, black temptation. Mentally, he gropes for the voices of the other two boys, trying to pick out the thrum of their words against his skin from the movement of the truck.

"The place I was at before. Got in trouble with Gjallarhorn and had to disband."

"With who?"

"Gjallarhorn. They're, uh…"

Eyes still closed, Chad mumbles, "Space cops," then breathes, opens his eyes again so he doesn't have to think about space, about endless stars, about his sister's hands resting over his on a console, her laughter gentle above him as she guides them through—

"Yeah, that." The boy beside Chad shrugs. "All the property got compounded, and the whole thing got auctioned off. Human Debris too."

"Huh. Guess you can't really just leave us collecting dust like you would a pile of scrap."

"Only because it's illegal to let us starve."

"Really? There's laws like that?" Dante grunts as they hit another bump in the road and his and Chad's heads crack against each other. "Ow! Dammit…"

At Chad's own thin sound of pain, the boy beside him huffs. "Sit up straight," he says, voice low and gruff. "It's more trouble, but you'll bump together less."

"Right." Dante twists around, methodically inching himself upright. "Sorry."

Surprise flickers through Chad at the apology, a brief, searching beam of light sweeping through dark waters. Without thinking about it, he hums out a negation, and tries to straighten up a little himself.

"Still, making it all the way through something like that—I'm gonna stick with you. What's your name?"

Chad looks at the boy next to him, whose face has gone slack with shock, visible even in the gloom. "A-Akihiro," he stutters, and looks hurriedly away, his mouth thinning in consternation.

"Cool," Dante says, satisfied, then elbows Chad, who startles. "How about you?"

Somehow, saying his name is much harder than explaining about Gjallarhorn, but Chad concentrates, forcing it out past his lips and teeth.

"Akihiro and Chad," Dante repeats. "I'm Dante."

Akihiro doesn't respond, still turned away—Chad can see just a bit of color in his cheeks, though it could be the thin slant of light from one of the hairline cracks in the truck's metal walls—so Chad points out the obvious, "You already said that."

"Well—I said it again. So what? It's so you remember it better."

Like that, Dante keeps up the chatter until the truck begins to slow.


	2. Gaelio & Ein

_(things you said when you met my parents | things you said in the dark)_

(After he reveals his survival to the world, Gaelio delays seeing his father again for as long as he can. Gallus can't understand why, right up until they meet in person. Afterwards, Gaelio and Ein have a talk.)

* * *

 _He didn't like it._

Gaelio doesn't hear the words, not exactly and explicitly those words. But ever since the end of the uprising, that last fight with McGillis, he's gotten better than ever at interpreting the ebbs and flows of Ein's emotions.

And, well, it had been fairly obvious that his father hadn't liked much of what he'd seen. No surprises there.

He stretches out in the pilot seat, reaching up to thumb the hatch control. It slides shut, enclosing him in a brief darkness before the control array lights up, casting the cockpit in its warm orange light. Behind him, a dim red glow seeps past the Type-E generators' half-closed shutters. Gaelio sighs. One of his hands strays up to the thick metal cuff pressed around the back of his neck.

"No," he allows, considering his words. "He didn't."

 _You—already knew he wouldn't?_

"Mm. The taboo against mechanical enhancement—it's even stronger on Earth than it is in the Outer Sphere." He pauses, but there's no getting around the words; Ein would pick up on the silence, and he doesn't have it in him to obfuscate. He adds, "I used to feel the same way."

 _Space rats.._ There's a spike in the Alaya system's low hum, and the red light flickers brighter; Ein's hatred buzzes in Gaelio's teeth. He runs his hand over the rim of metal around the nearest generator, and the electric whir slows and quiets. _That time before—you apologized to that child for hating him. But you're_ not _the same as him._

"Ah, don't get mad, Ein…" Gaelio sighs, a smile tugging at his lips, an ache lodging itself in his chest. "It's all just—humans changing. Just different ways of doing that."

 _I don't understand._ Clear as day, the image forms in Gaelio's mind—Ein's stern frown and forthright stare. Gaelio could almost laugh, but it would be rude, and anyway, he isn't sure it wouldn't come out a sob. The way Father had _looked_ at him…

"That's fine." He pulls up one knee into the pilot seat and pushes himself into a sideways list, resting his forehead against polished metal. In the hangar's reduced gravity, and Ein's ghostly embrace, he floats easily in place. He breathes, "We'll get there."


	3. Almiria & Atra

_(things you said with clenched fists | things you said under your breath)_

(Somewhere, explosions are happening. Well. Perhaps they're happening here, too.)

(A snippet of a conversation between two women who survived.)

* * *

"He promised me he'd come back," the girl says, the words almost too quiet to catch.

"That was cruel," Atra replies, before she can think to stop herself. The girl gives her a swift, shocked look. Her eyes—huge, violet-colored eyes, which match the lone flower she wears in her long hair—swim with unspoken words.

"No one can promise that." Atra's eyes fall to her wrist. It still feels bare, sometimes, but she touches her fingers to it, and remembers where the bracelet sits now—on a wrist that matters so much more than her own life, her own happiness. Three good luck charms on Akatsuki's wrist, three prayers, three wills, and they haven't failed him so far. "He should have just told you he would do his best."

Atra smiles—a slow, pained curve. "That's all mine told me."

She catches movement out of the corner of her eye and looks back up; the girl has opened her mouth, but nothing emerges. Resentment tangles her brows together, and she presses her lips tightly closed, her gaze turning down to the floor.

"I'm sorry for your loss," the girl says, the words practiced and empty. Is that, Atra wonders, the kind of thing that passes for good manners on Earth?

She takes a careful step closer. "I'm sorry for yours."

Once again, the girl looks at her with widened eyes. After a moment, she smiles, a little off-balance, but terribly genuine, rimmed with grief. "You know, no one's actually told me that before. They all just wanted me to forget about him and move on."

Atra's throat tightens with sorrow, though somewhere in the back of her mind, anger sparks too. If someone— _anyone_ —had bothered to talk Almiria Bauduin through her loss, would everyone even be here now? "Then they were cruel, too."

* * *

(Notes: I hope that, if we ever get a Ride's Rebellion OVA, it accompanies Almiria's Adolescence Apocalypse. She is perhaps the single most ill-served, under-utilized character in the whole show, and her absence was the only thing about the epilogue that I truly disliked.)


	4. Almiria & Todo

_(things you said when we first met | things you said when no one else was around_ )

(If the last chapter was near the end of Almiria's Adolescence Apocalypse, this is, perhaps, the beginning.)

* * *

"I worked for your husband."

Almiria stares at the man. In the back of her mind, an echo of training bestirs itself to murmur, _You should be running inside and calling security right now,_ but the voice is thin and weary, and Almiria remains seated. Beneath the darkened porch, the man won't be able to see her shadowed face any better than she can see his where he lurks at the edge of the manicured garden. _Im Wachen Wald_ —an old Earth novel Gaelio sent, one she hasn't read a line of since the sun began to set—sits in her lap like a dead thing, mute and heavy with knowledge from beyond an impassable boundary.

"Many people worked for my husband." The words fall on her ears without seeming to pass through her lips. _My husband_. Though she isn't sure she spoke the words, they leave a sweet taste all the same, an edge of sugar at the tip of her tongue, dissolving slowly. It's been so long since anyone spoke to her of that man—of that bond. Almiria closes her eyes. Smiles, very faintly. "Have you come to kill me?"

The man sputters, then laughs. Almiria opens her eyes, and finds the man bowed forward and clutching his knees, with thin hands, sallow-skinned in the moonlight.

"Shit, you Seven Stars brats really are all like that, huh!" he finally manages. "What's with that question? 'Have you come to'—" He breaks off, wheezing with the effort of keeping his voice low. He wears neither uniform nor any sort of insignia, just slacks and a button-down shirt beneath a neutral-colored vest. She can't place his accent, and under the circumstances, that means he's probably not from Earth.

 _He called me a brat_. Her thoughts finally catch up to her, but bring no answers. She rests her hands on the open pages of the book, and goes on examining the man. He's older, with a terrible little mustache and too much belly for the thinness of his frame. A bad diet, perhaps, or too much drink.

"You aren't Gjallarhorn," Almiria says, hands unmoving on the pages of Gaelio's book.

"Obviously." The stranger snorts, and straightens up, pushing his hands into his pockets. _A weapon_ , Almiria thinks, but the man just goes on slouching in front of her, glancing around with narrowed eyes.

"No one will come," Almiria tells him, tilting her head slightly to one side. "Not unless I call them. The last nurse leaves after dinner."

"They do patrols, though," he replies, returning his gaze to her. The black shadows of leaves obscure the color of his eyes. "Wouldn't want any of the princesses running away from their castles."

Almiria closes the book, and pushes herself out of her chair, ignoring the man's soft grunt of surprise.

"What do you want?" she asks, suddenly tired and sore, as if the hours sitting on the porch have caught up with her all at once. "If you don't stop playing games, I _will_ call them."

In the quiet—too early in the year for cicadas, and too long after dark for birds—his eyes scan over her, measuring. No—testing.

Well. Never let it be said that Almiria Bauduin Fareed is not a lady of her word.

She turns away.

"Well—I guess you could call me a hidden asset," the man says behind her, a little too hurriedly for his attempt at an unconcerned drawl. "From Lord Fareed's—ah, what do people like you call it…? Hedge funds?"

"I think that's probably wrong," Almiria answers, and turns back towards her very unannounced visitor. She hitches one shoulder up, and leans against a column, her eyes wandering out across the silvered green. "Do you mean you're from Montag?"

A beat of silence in the yard—she's surprised him. Despite everything, she's still good at surprising her elders.

"I'm his wife," she whispers, to the stranger, to herself, to the small, empty yard of the "health retreat" her father, doctor and lawyer had conspired to send her on. "I _did_ look over his records." Then, because she's an honest girl still, she adds, "Eventually."

"Uh, right," he says, and rallies. "Well, you're kind of right. I worked for him when he was working for Montag. Freaky mask and all."

There, finally, a surprise. Almiria peers towards the man. "Mask? What do you mean?"

In the dark, the man's mouth hitches up to one side, a flash of a grin. In a wheedling tone, he says, "Well, I'll tell you. But you won't get to hear all of it if I get snatched up by security."

She observes him for a moment longer. What is he here for? What does he think he's going to gain from this—because there's certainly something he thinks to gain. Not since hearing her name fall from Rustal Elion's lips in his litany of her husband's offenses has Almiria believed in altruism. But then, because this man doesn't seem like the kind who believes in altruism either, he probably has something to offer her.

 _He called McGillis my husband,_ Almiria thinks, and feels her lips move in a fond smile. She steps back, and places her hand on the door to her apartment.

"Please," she says, and opens the door. Light spills out onto the porch, a yellow path stretching out over the grass.

"Come inside."

* * *

Notes: I'm strangely fond of Todo Mirkonen, who is terrible and opportunistic, but also really entertaining. I like that McGillis is straight with him in a way that, curiously, he is with virtually no one else, and Todo responds to this with an odd sort of respect. They're deeply glib but entirely frank with one another, and it's sort of great.

But I wondered-what happened to him after the series? And, well, one possibility just leaped to suggest itself. Todo could get McGillis, the most wanted man in the system, off of Mars right under Arianrhod's nose. I'm certain he could get Almiria into any kind of trouble she wanted to get into, just so long as she was feeding him.


End file.
